Adventures in Charcuterie Episode III - When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Preserved Lemons

I'm pretty sure it was Liz who first introduced me to Moroccan food.  I can't remember exactly when or where, but I'm pretty certain it was somewhere in Vancouver, sometime in the late '90s.  It was a real gamechanger for me, food-wise.

Up until that time, I had eaten pretty much every variety of Asian, and most varieties of European cuisines, but aside from a handful of South African dishes that my mom would make, I had never tried any sort of African cuisine before.  Moroccan food, with it's aromatic spice blends, slow-cooked tagines, and novel-looking starches was a gateway to a whole new, and delicious, world for me.

So naturally, I eventually wanted to try cooking it myself, discovering in the process, that Moroccan food can be a real pain in the @$$ to make.

Why, you ask?  Because procurement of all the different spices and condiments can be a serious impediment.  Some of them, such as mace and saffron, are not so much hard to come by as they are annoyingly expensive.  But others, such as, say, ras el hanout, are pretty much impossible to find, leaving you to instead procure 20 separate individual spices in order to blend your own.

Which brings us to preserved lemons.  Preserved lemons, so key to so many amazing Moroccan dishes, is both difficult to find, and annoyingly expensive when found.  Fortunately, it is incredibly easy to make your own.

Here's the mise en place:

A clean jar, with a lid
Enough lemons to be able to fill the jar with lemon halves (and maybe a few extra if you like)
Kosher salt (lots)

Ready to preserve some lemons?  Here we go:

1. First, you'll need to rinse/scrub the lemons.  Mold is the only thing that has the potential to screw with this process, so a bit of a surface cleaning of the lemons is useful.
2. Trim the ends off of the lemons and then cut them in half
3. Pour about an inch or so of salt into the jar
4. Jam as many lemon halves into the jar as you can
   
5. Pour more salt into the jar until it is completely full
   
6. Optional: If you have a few extra lemons squeeze their juice into the jar
   
7. Seal up the jar and put it someplace dark for three weeks

It should look something like this

Three weeks later, you will have beautiful preserved lemons.

Let your adventures in Moroccan cuisine begin!

...

What's that you say?  You don't know any Moroccan food recipes?  OK, I'll post a couple up in the near future, but in the meantime:

Using Your Preserved Lemons

• Pull one half lemon out of the brine
• Scrape out the flesh from the middle and discard it (it is technically still edible, but tends to be overpoweringly salty)
• Slice the rind into thin strips
• Use the strips to garnish your favourite salad

Adventures in Charcuterie - Episode II: Makin' Bacon

Bacon is one of the world's truly perfect foods.  So versatile, it can be eaten as a part of any meal.  So universal, some version of it is featured in every culture that has figured out how to grow pigs.  So delicious, there are entire religions built around not eating it.  It's also gluten-free, so Liz can eat it too!

It should go without saying that having tried my hand at making sausage, that making bacon would be the next logical maneuver.

Adventures in Charcuterie - Episode 1: This is how sausage is made

Every culture in human history that has achieved any kind of success has figured out a way to make some variation on tubular meat.  Much like humanity's eternal need to get a buzz (a post for another time), the need for delicious, preservable, and portable meat preparations is universal.

Having grown up eating a variety of different European and Asian sausages, I was very excited to receive Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie cookbook for Christmas.

And so, after doing some reading and ordering some materials online, I set to work at making my first ever batch of sausage.

Mise-en-Place:

5 lbs  Pork Shoulder / pork butt / picnic ham / etc (this cut of pig has a lot of names)
3 tbsp Salt
1 tbsp Pepper
3 tbsp Chopped Garlic
1 cup Red Wine (ice cold)
Casings, rinsed, and soaked (optional)

Butchery:



You don't want the pork skin in your sausage, so trim that off.  It should go without saying to make sure you use a very sharp knife, but I'm saying it anyways.  Dull knives are dangerous!

Dice the pork.  I went with about a 1-inch dice, and to be honest, I should have gone smaller, as the bigger pieces required more effort to get through the grinder.

Season the pork with the salt, pepper and garlic.  It's easiest to just use your hands to mix all the ingredients and get everything uniform.

SUPER IMPORTANT: Chill everything in the freezer for 30-60 minutes.  Also, put all the pieces of your grinder in the freezer too.  The grinding process will generate a fair bit of heat, and if your meat heats up too much, the fat will melt, thereby killing your sausage's texture.  Warmer temperatures are also more conducive to microbial growth, and bacteria growing in your sausage is bad.

Grinding:

Grind your meat through the coarse die, into a bowl set into ice (again, temperature control is tres important).




This is a visceral process, so be prepared for that if you've never done it before.  I used the grinder attachment for our KitchenAid Mixer, and it worked pretty well, although there was a fair bit of what sausage geeks call "smear" going on, which isn't ideal.

Nonetheless, I managed to get everything ground without too much hassle.  I did have to stop and clear the grinder once during the process, which was every bit as gross as you'd think it would be.

Mixing:

Add the cold wine to the ground meat and mix to combine.  I used the paddle attachment on our KitchenAid for about a minute or so.

Chill and Test:

Pull a sample (2 tbsp or so) of the sausage mixture and put the rest into the freezer to chill while you do some quality control.


Saute your sample in a pan with a little bit of oil and taste it.

My sample tasted salty as all hell - you know, if hell were a salt flat that you were trying to eat.  In retrospect, I should have reduced the amount of salt to account for the amount of pork lost when I removed the skin at the start of the prep.  Ah well, not much to do about it at this point except press on to:

Stuffing:

Not strictly necessary.  It's totally fine to shape the sausage into patties at this point and call it a day, but I wanted to try our sausage stuffer attachment too, so away we went.

I bought pretubed, natural hog casings from thesausagemaker.com and soaked them overnight to make sure they'd be ready to go.

As with grinding, I made sure to chill all the stuffer parts in the freezer prior to use.

The stuffing process takes some getting used to, and my inner 12-year old kept wanting to make terrible, and juvenile comments the whole time.  I had some difficulty gauging how full to stuff the casings, and wound up splitting the casing at one point when I overstuffed one section, and also wound up with a few sections that were woefully understuffed.  But after a little while, I sorta got the hang of it, and after twisting the stuffed coil into links, wound up with this:



Not a bad-looking result for a first time, I figure.  Total yield was about 18 six-inch links.

Cooking and Tasting:

As noted earlier, this first batch was a fair bit on the salty side.  In an attempt to off-set that in the cooking process the first time I went to cook some of these, I did two things:

1. I blanched the sausages for a couple of minutes in simmering water to draw out some of the excess salt.
2. I sauteed the blanched sausages together with onions, peppers and mushrooms that had not been seasoned with any salt, allowing the salt from the sausage to do the seasoning for me.

That approach worked pretty well, and Liz and I enjoyed a couple of dinners the following week using this formula.

Other things we're looking forward to trying with this sausage include pasta sauce, and cassoulet, which also seem like good applications that can off-set a salty sausage.

A Few Other Notes:

There is a lot of garlic in this sausage.  Make sure you have a fresh box of baking soda in your fridge and in your freezer so that you don't wind up flavouring your entire food supply with garlic.  Not that it's necessarily a bad thing in all cases, but chilling a beverage with garlic-infused ice cubes probably isn't what you're looking for...